Soldier's memoirs trench truth. Vladimir PershaninPenalty, scouts, infantry

Before you is a collection of memoirs of SS and Wehrmacht soldiers. The interviews were taken from them many years after the Great War, when time passed, emotions left, and each participant in those events had the opportunity to more calmly, impartially assess the events of past years.

Eyewitnesses talk about how the war began, about the hardships and hardships of wartime, about the successes and defeats of their military units (armies? Troops?), about the fate of ordinary soldiers and about when and how this war ended for each of them. They remember the heavy battles, captivity, the march to the East and the flight to the West, the Russian soldiers and ordinary people whom they met in the occupied territories. These are the memories of those who were once our enemy, a strong, cunning, merciless enemy that we were able to defeat.

It is impossible to learn the lessons of history, perceiving the enemy as an abstract entity, forgetting that there were the same people on the other side - with their own feelings and thoughts, ideas and plans for life. If we forget about this, then the nightmare of the Great Patriotic War may be repeated, and all the losses and sacrifices will be in vain.

This book is a reminder and warning to all who have forgotten about the feat of our people. We must remember our history and learn from our mistakes. Without a past, a people has no future. And the enemy must be known by sight.

Hero of the Soviet Union, Major General S. M. Kramarenko

Foreword

The desire to interview German veterans has matured in me for a long time. It was curious to look at the events of that time from the side of the enemy, to find out the realities of life not in May of the Central Committee of their soldiers, their attitude to the war, to Russia, to frost and mud, to victories and defeats. In many ways, this interest was fed by the experience of interviews with our veterans, in which a different story was revealed than the one emasculated, set out on paper. However, I had absolutely no idea how to approach this, especially given my lack of knowledge of the German language. For several years I have been looking for partners in Germany. From time to time, Russian-speaking Germans appeared, who seemed to be interested in this topic, but time passed, and it turned out that things did not go beyond declarations. And in 2012, I decided that it was time to get down to business myself, since there was no time to wait. Starting this project, I understood that it would not be easy to implement it, and the first, most obvious, problem was finding informants. A list of veteran organizations was found on the Internet, probably compiled back in the 70s. I asked Olga Miloserdova, who lives in Holland but speaks good German, to start calling. Firstly, it turned out that all these organizations are one person, a coordinator, from whom one could sometimes find out about his fellow soldiers, but basically the answer was simple: “Everyone died.” In almost a year of work, about 300 phones of such veteran coordinators were called, of which 96% turned out to be wrong, 3% died, and half a percent were those who either refused to be interviewed for various reasons or agreed. Based on the results of this part of the work, we can say that informal veteran associations in Germany (meaning its Western part, since they were generally banned in the Eastern part) have practically ceased to exist since 2010. This is primarily due to the fact that they were created as a private initiative. No material or other assistance was provided through veteran organizations, and membership in them did not provide any advantages, unlike similar associations in the former USSR and Russia. In addition, there were practically no associations of veteran organizations, with the exception of the veteran organization of mountain rifle units and the organization of knights of the Knight's Cross and the Association of repatriates, prisoners and missing during the war. Accordingly, with the departure of the bulk of veterans and the infirmity of the remaining ones, ties were broken, organizations were closed. The absence of such associations as a city or regional council led to the fact that, after interviewing an informant in Munich, the next interview could go 400 kilometers to Dresden, and then return back to Munich, because the informant in Dresden gave the telephone number of his Munich acquaintance . Thus, during the few weeks that I spent in Germany, I covered more than 10,000 kilometers by car. The cost of one interview turned out to be very high, and if it were not for the support of Wargaiming, the authors of the World of Tanks game, and the Yauza publishing house, the project would never have been implemented. Great help in finding veterans was provided by Peter Steger. The son of a soldier who went through Russian captivity, he not only leads the society of sister cities of Erlangen and Vladimir, but also collected the memories of former prisoners of war who were in the camps of Vladimir (http://erlangenwladimir.wordpress.com/category/veteranen/). Another person who helped me in my work is the historian Martin Regel, who is engaged in the history of the Waffen SS. He handed over two tapes of interviews with veterans. In the future, after seeing the reaction of the Internet community to the interviews I posted, he refused to cooperate. The book also includes an interview with Vladimir Kuznetsov. His experience of living in Germany, knowledge of realities and language allowed him to get interviews much more informative than mine. I hope that our cooperation will continue in the future, and new interviews, like those included in the book, will be posted on the site "I remember" www.iremember.ru in the "Opponents" section.

Separately, I want to say thanks to Anna Yakupova, who took care of organizing numerous flights, transfers, hotels. Without her help, the work would have been much more difficult.

As for the interview itself, of course, it was complicated by the fact that it went through an interpreter who only conveyed the general direction of the conversation (otherwise it would have taken twice as long), and it was not easy for me to respond with questions to the story and that - to clarify. However, the translators did an excellent job. Most of the interviews were consistently translated by Anastasia Pupynina, who, on the basis of the interviews, will write her master's thesis at the University of Konstanz. In addition to her work as an interpreter, she was involved in organizing interviews with veterans and, as part of the project, continues to maintain contact with some of them after the meeting. In addition to her, I was lucky to work with Olga Richter, who did an excellent job with the task, as well as the translators of the audio recordings, Valentin Seleznev and Oleg Mironov. As a result of this joint work, texts were obtained that, in terms of style, information content, and emotional load, are very different from interviews with our veterans. It was also unexpected that in Germany, unlike the countries of the former USSR, there is practically no difference between written and oral speech, which is expressed in the line: “Some words are for kitchens, others are for the streets.” There were also practically no combat episodes in the interview. In Germany, it is not customary to be interested in the history of the Wehrmacht and the SS in isolation from the crimes they committed, concentration camps or captivity. Almost everything that we know about the German army, we know thanks to the popularization activities of the Anglo-Saxons. It is no coincidence that Hitler considered them close to "race and tradition" people. Reading these stories, I recommend to refrain from any assessment of the words of the respondents. The war unleashed by the criminal leadership robbed these people of the best time of their lives - youth. Moreover, according to its results, it turned out that they fought not for those, but their ideals were false. The rest, most of my life, I had to justify myself to myself, the winners and my own state for my participation in this war. All this, of course, was expressed in the creation of their own version of events and their role in them, which a reasonable reader will take into account, but will not judge. Subjective judgments are common to all people. Of course, the subjectivity of the memories of our veterans is close and understandable to us, and the former enemy causes certain negative emotions: that war brought too much suffering and too much in our modern society is associated with it. Nevertheless, I would like the reader, when opening this book, to consider people who agreed to tell about their lives, not as potential culprits in the death of their relatives and friends, but as carriers of a unique historical experience, without knowing which we will lose a piece of knowledge about the Winners .

I went to the front in September 1942. After staying in the reserve regiment for ten days, I rushed to the battlefield. And I'm not the only one. After the first week in the regiment, many soldiers hurried to the front. Why? The food there was much better. For example, in the morning we received thin porridge or pea soup, half a small herring and five hundred grams of bread. We were also given a pinch of sugar and a pinch of tobacco. I, a non-smoker, exchanged tobacco for sugar.

At the front, as a graduate of special school No. 005, I was immediately offered to be certified as an officer. I asked: “And how long will this certification wait for me?”.

Then another question arose: I wrote that I was born in 1926. They called me and asked:

What nonsense have you written?

— But I really was born in 1926.

- So he's not drafted yet!

“What should I do, since I already got to you?”

- Then write at least the year 1925!

Why do I need this?

- What do you mean why? We cannot do otherwise.

“So this is…

- Write the year 1924 or 1925 and hand over the documents.

Then they told me: “Well, what difference does it make to you? Since you got here, does it matter what year you have? I even agreed, but then asked how long it would take to be promoted to officer. They told me two months. After thinking, I decided that I could not stand it for so long and abandoned this case. So, as a foreman, as I was registered at the transit point, I went to the sapper company.

Returning to everyday issues, I note that there was no monetary allowance in the reserve regiment. And what kind of money is needed there? But when we were sent to the active unit (I ended up in the Guards Brigade), then we were all given a new set of linen, several towels, a footcloth and a piece of soap. When we were loading into the train at the Kavkazskaya station, some of the soldiers, having three hours to spare, instantly drove to the local population and exchanged all their belongings for lard, vodka and bread.

At the front, the situation changed: they began to give us cash benefits. I, as a foreman of the first year of service, received about 60 rubles. In 1944, the third year of my service, the amount increased to almost 200 rubles. At that time, I was listed as the commander of an anti-tank gun. And yet my allowance was much less than the officer's salary: the lieutenant received about 1100 - 1200 rubles. In 1944, the salaries of soldiers were increased. I began to receive 450 rubles as a gun commander. And it was already a significant, noticeable amount.

It is clear that money is useless in the war, so all our allowance was deducted to savings books. During demobilization, I received a fabulous amount for those times - 6,000 rubles.

"Studebakers" in the reserve of the command of the Red Army. (wikipedia.org)

There is still debate about the role played by the American Lend-Lease. I will say one thing: we soldiers felt that we were supported from outside. For us it was of great importance. Let me give you some facts. Our entire rifle brigade, which was part of the famous guards corps that fought near Moscow at the beginning of 1942, arrived in the Caucasus, was dressed either in British or American uniforms. Ours was not. What form?! Then not everyone had shoulder straps: we walked without any insignia.

On August 8, 1943, in the forests near Voronezh, we were given American equipment: Studebakers, Willys, and so on. Subsequently, these machines were worn out and ditched in the mud of Ukraine. But then without them we could do nothing. Therefore, the support of the allies was felt by us in full measure, and it cannot be underestimated in any way. By the way, the first car I got behind the wheel of was a Studebaker.

Of course, everyone expected more from the Allies. We didn’t understand why they were trampling around in Italy for so long, why they were afraid to land there: we crossed the Dnieper, but they couldn’t master some kind of English Channel.

In the spring of 1944, under the command of Konev, and then Malinovsky, we reached the border. The first question that arose among the soldiers was: “Why should we go beyond the border? Maybe it’s worth standing up here and holding the line, and let whoever wants to fight the Germans go on and fight? ” They began to explain to us that it was impossible to defeat the Fritz in this way, we should not count on the fact that they would leave us alone, we must move on.

When we crossed the border, entered Romania, we saw how people live there. There has been a turn in our brains. And after all business was in the following. Our front spent the summer of 1944 on the defensive. We went on the offensive only in August: a battle began near Iasi. Then we did not think about the end of the war, but when we crossed the border ...

So, I am sitting in the battery, soldiers are resting nearby. One asks the other: “Do you think there will be collective farms after the war?” “I don’t know, ask the foreman.” (That is, I have). “So, foreman, will there be collective farms after the war?” “Why shouldn't they be? It's such a step forward." Then I was a rather propagandized person, a boy. My other interlocutor stood up and said: “Why are you asking him? He didn’t live on the collective farm, he doesn’t know anything about it.” And he was right - I was a city dweller.

And that's when I realized that among the soldiers there were talks about the fate of collective farms, collective farmers. All this worries and alarms them.

The 2nd Ukrainian Front is advancing near Iasi. (wikipedia.org)

Passing through Romania, Hungary, seeing how the local population lives, we were amazed. The political department was informed: "The soldiers say that one owner has more than our collective farm." And how could one not be surprised: comfort, beautiful houses (especially in the northern part of Hungary), a different way of life, a completely different culture. For example, for the first time I saw a bath in the house, despite the fact that I was a city dweller. Just imagine how the village guys looked at her! They've only heard about it. At that moment, it became completely clear to us: in order to live like this, you need to have a completely different atmosphere, different material security.

Sources

Echo of Moscow, "The Price of Victory": Soldier's Memoirs: War Through the Eyes of a Private

V. DYMARSKY: Hello, I greet the audience of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, the RTVi TV channel, those who watch the “setviewer” and, in general, those who are in touch with us. In touch with the studio of the program "The Price of Victory". I am its presenter Vitaly Dymarsky. And today we have another program. Throughout all those years that our program has already been on the air, we still paid the main attention to such, perhaps, macroelements of the Second World War.

This is both politics and diplomacy, and in military aspects it was more a conversation at the level of fronts, divisions. We did not sink, or rarely did we sink very much, to everyday life, or something, to what, by the way, in Soviet, but in general in domestic literature, was once called “trench truth”. And today, one of those rare programs when our guest, I wanted to say, is not a historian, but this is not true, because our guest is a historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Igor Mikhailovich Krivoguz, but he is the author of the book "Soldier's Memoirs ". The author of the book "Soldier's Memoirs" and it is clear that these soldier's memoirs are the memories of a man who went through almost all the years of the war. Yes, Igor Mikhailovich? Since 1942?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Since 1942, August 1942.

V. DYMARSKY: Almost all the years since August 1942. And these "Soldier's Memoirs", it seems to me, are a very sincere good book of a man, I repeat once again, a man from a trench in fact. A man from the active army. A man who visited both the partisans and the regular, in the active army, the Red Army. And, among other things, I have already said that Igor Mikhailovich is a doctor of historical sciences, a professor, so maybe we will touch on more general issues, in addition to such purely soldierly memories.

Igor Mikhailovich, the first question is for you. Here I mentioned the so-called "trench" prose. As a matter of fact, this is all we know about that war. This is Grossman, Astafiev, who else can be remembered there ... Baklanov, probably, such front-line writers. There was another, more traditional semi-official, or something, literature, which presented everything in such a rather rosy color, everything that happened. Here is your feeling of the war, as a participant - is ... Do we know the truth about that war? That's about the war, again, I repeat this word, "trench"?

I. KRIVOGUZ: The truth develops when we look at an object from different points of view. And, probably, what the marshals and generals wrote was very important. Although their memoirs were edited to suit the political situation, everyone knows this. Another point of view is that lieutenant's prose, starting with Nekrasov, Baklanov and then a number of others. This was also true. The truth, seen from the trench, seen directly in battle. And, finally, it must be said directly that this, probably, was not yet the whole truth, because, for example, Simonov, he just introduced the concept of "soldier's memoirs." And he showed on TV conversations with soldiers, with the most ordinary participants in the battles. And they also had their own truth. And only by adding all this, we get a very mosaic picture, it may not always be smooth, but it will be the real truth.

When I wrote my memoirs, I, first of all, took as a basis the impressions that I had when I was an instructor at the headquarters of the partisan movement in the south, the commander of a sabotage group of the same headquarters. Then I ended up in the active army, having received, God knows how, the rank of foreman. It's just that this title was attributed to me at the assembly point by a lieutenant who filtered the soldiers and sent them to reserve regiments. Attributed ... Apparently, I made an impression on him that after partisan affairs I had a good sheepskin coat, good boots and a hat. He decided that I, if not an officer, then at least a foreman. And so I was very surprised when I later saw myself on the list as a foreman, but it was inconvenient to refuse, although I didn’t need it at all, I didn’t aspire to become a foreman ... And so I was a platoon commander in a company of sappers. Then I turned out to be an anti-tank gun commander in an anti-tank battalion, where they made me a battalion foreman, although I was not very eager for this either. It was such, well, political work, freelance, at the lowest level, but among young people, who were many in this anti-tank division. And so I ended the war in this post, participating in battles with tanks, participating in small arms operations, and even ended up in China. I have completed this trip...

V. DYMARSKY: In Japan?

I. KRIVOGUZ: ... near the city of Xinzhou on the shores of the Yellow China Sea. This is also an interesting page. And then I tried to check my impressions in the archives. He worked in Podolsk in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, restored details, restored facts, events. And all this allowed me to create, so to speak, those memories that, it seems to me, give the most voluminous idea, with the exception of strategic reasoning. I'm not a general, I didn't write about them. But what concerned me in terms of even an operation, say, on the scale of a division, I stated there. For example, the crossing of the Dnieper, how the division coped with it. And why did we cross the Dnieper along the entire front along which we reached this river. They crossed it with great bloodshed and by all means at the cost of huge losses, but they ensured that the myth about this “eastern rampart”, which the Germans allegedly built there, was destroyed. And the Germans could not resist such a frontal onslaught. That, in fact, was my approach to writing these soldier's memoirs.

Of course, I always remembered that Simonov was the first to name this, and I tried to show how those unknown ordinary soldiers lived, who directly participated in battles with tanks, in battles with infantry, and so on.

V. DYMARSKY: Just to clarify, where did you mainly fight? South, right? Caucasus?

I. KRIVOGUZ: I had to go through... First of all, it's not exactly south, but from the point of view of Moscow, it's probably south. This is the Kalmyk Republic. That's where I transported partisan detachments across the conditional border of the front. There, to the south of Stalingrad, the front no longer had a continuous line, and now we led partisan detachments through these gaps, and I participated in the preparation and conduct of partisan detachments. They also intended to throw me there as the commander of the five of the sabotage group. But then the front rolled back so quickly that there was no need for this, and I was already in the active army.

V. DYMARSKY: I see, I understand. Igor Mikhailovich, did you go to the front in 1942?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes.

V. DYMARSKY: You said in August 1942.

I. KRIVOGUZ: In August. Well, in September, actually.

V. DYMARSKY: The time, in general, is not yet the most successful, let's say, for our army.

I. KRIVOGUZ: This is the time of Stalin's order "Not one step back."

V. DYMARSKY: Yes. How were the results, let's say neutrally, of the first year of the war, how were they perceived by the soldiers? Have you discussed this among yourselves?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Well, of course. The soldiers talked about this without thinking broadly. And they thought on the basis of the experience that they had. And they told me as soon as I got in - I first got into the city of Grozny in a communist battalion, and there were foremen, our sergeants were recovering from their wounds, they survived the first year of the war - and they talked about how they draped, as they expressed then. And I myself saw in Grozny, where my family lived and where I finished school, how our people fled from Rostov in the summer of 1942, often abandoning their weapons and guns, even artillery. In our artillery anti-tank battalion, where I later got, there was a deputy battalion commander, a senior lieutenant. This senior lieutenant, as we knew, although he did not like to think about it or talk about it, was the commander of an artillery brigade, and he had a diamond in his buttonhole - he was a general. Then there was no shoulder strap, a rhombus is the first general rank, major general. And he lost his guns while crossing the Don, he lost his fighters. He was put on trial, demoted to senior lieutenant. And only by the end of the war he rose to the rank of captain, he was given the rank of captain, deputy division commander.

V. DYMARSKY: Well, I understand.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Compared to the brigade commander in 1942. This is his fate, which I saw, and how hard he was going through. This man was very persistent, but it was clear that what had happened to him was terribly hard for him. And the soldiers for the most part ... So I ended up in a reserve regiment, and there were convalescents from hospitals and they exchanged experience with each other. I have listened to these stories. It must be said frankly that they never mentioned or scolded our leadership. It must have been in the depths of their minds. What was not expressed. But they told pictures of the flight and helplessness of the bosses, and simply stupidity and panic, which then in such cases was very much. Sometimes people get caught through no fault of their own. My classmate after the end of the decade was sent, it seems, to the Krasnodar cavalry school. This was back in the spring of 1942, somewhere in May, in June he was already at the school. The command of the school abandoned the school and the soldiers fled. Where were they to go? They were unfired cadets, they had no bosses. He went home to his mother in Grozny. It was natural, but what will he do? He was caught as a deserter and - in a penal battalion. And he died in a penal battalion near Prokhorovka already in 1943. Such were the fates then. And the soldiers talked about it.

I stayed in the reserve regiment, thank God, it seems, 10-12 days, no more. And everyone there, after the hospitals, after the first week of being in the reserve regiment, rushed to the front. Because in the reserve regiment the feeding was such that it was impossible to stand there for a long time. And therefore, the strongest, most persistent of them were there for two weeks, and then one way or another they asked and were sent to the front.

V. DYMARSKY: Did they feed you better at the front?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Well, there is no comparison. There we received five hundred grams of bread. In the morning, thin, thin porridge or pea soup and half a small herring per person. True, they gave a pinch of sugar and a pinch of tobacco. I, a non-smoker, exchanged tobacco for sugar. But they always stood in line with me for an exchange, because many were avid "courses". There, as a graduate of special school 005 - this was such a partisan school for the training of instructors and saboteurs - they immediately offered to certify me as an officer. I asked: how long will this certification wait for me? Further more than that. A question arose - I wrote that I was born in 1926. They called me, they said: “What nonsense did you write?”. I say: "Well, I really was born in 1926." "So he's not drafted yet!" I say: “Well, what are you going to do, so I came to you here ...”. “Well, write at least 1925!” I say: "Why do I need this?". “Well, how is it, we can’t!”. I say: "So this is ...". "Well, write 1924 or 1925 and let's hand over the documents." I say: "Yes, no ...". In short, they told me later: “Well, what difference does it make to you? Since you already got here, so what difference does it make what year you have? I even agreed. And then he asked, how long to wait for the production of this as an officer? And they say: "Well, two months." I thought and said: “I can’t stand this.” And he abandoned the case. So I am a foreman, as I was registered at the transit point, and went to the sapper company.

V. DYMARSKY: Well, after all, they probably went not only for food.

I. KRIVOGUZ: No, of course, it's not about hunger. The thing is, they knew they were going to have to go there anyway. That is, they had no alternative. But they believed that, in general, if you want to starve here, it’s better to eat well there. One way or another, you will still get to the front. Therefore, they wanted not to continue the torment for too long. Let's rest for two weeks and that's enough.

V. DYMARSKY: And what was your allowance? Was it something too?

I. KRIVOGUZ: What?

V. DYMARSKY: Monetary allowance.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Oh, this is ridiculous. Well, in the reserve regiment they didn’t give anything, no monetary allowance. And what kind of money was needed there? There's something else. That's when they sent us to the active part - so I got into the guards brigade - then everyone was given a new set of underwear. One for themselves, the other gave out a set of linen. They gave towels, gave a footcloth and a piece of soap. And when we loaded into the echelon at the Kavkazskaya station, so that we would be transferred by echelon to Krasnodar, and there already into the mountains to the front to the front line, then all the soldiers, having three hours, they immediately ran away - there was a mass of enterprising people from the locals around our echelon residents - and bartered soap, linen, towels, spare footcloths for something essential: lard, vodka, and, well, bread, they could not do without bread. It was considered a very normal legal operation and it was such a tradition that it was not for us to change it. And when I got there, they paid like this: the first year, the second year, the third year they raised it. I received, as a foreman of the first year of service, something like 60 rubles. But then, the first and second years I went, in 1944 I was already in the third year of service, I received something like 150, almost 200 rubles. He was listed as the commander of an anti-tank gun and now he had this money. It was much less than the officer's salary. The lieutenant received approximately 1100-1200 rubles. And then, in the summer of 1944, the salaries of privates and soldiers were raised, and I began to receive 450 rubles as a gun commander. And it was already a significant, noticeable thing.

V. DYMARSKY: Igor Mikhailovich, why is there money in the war?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Money in the war is useless, because they were all deducted to our books. And you only get what you need. But you didn’t need at all, because, in general, we were given allowances, although intermittently, but sufficient. in the active army. And on our territory, they usually negotiated with residents in exchange for all kinds of services, even on the front line, if there was a settlement and we at least had an overnight stay there, we always found the opportunity to exchange for something there that chicken ... And in Russia, ownerless to liquidate the chicken without the permission of the owners. So it was after crossing the Dnieper, when, of course, there were no inhabitants in the village of Kutsevolovka, the Germans stole them, and the stupid chickens remained, they simply had no idea what awaited them. And when our division forcefully broke into it, then, of course, they became the first victim, especially since food was supplied through the Dnieper intermittently at first, and then everything worked out slowly. Abroad, there were no problems, because our authorities issued lei for Romania. Ours printed these lei, which had a fabulous exchange rate. Almost one of our lei - one hundred Romanian lei or something like that, a fantastic exchange rate. That is, for a lei you could have a drink and a snack. Soldiers used these lei to buy horses when our horses fell – and we also had a cart carrying various unnecessary things like gas masks, for example – and we moved in this way, paying with these lei. The inhabitants, of course, especially the horses, the peasants did not want to sell. But when they knew that our path was indefinitely long and it was not known where we were going, they agreed to receive at least lei for the horse. There were no interruptions in food supply, even if our standard food did not reach us. The money went to the book. And during demobilization, I received a fabulous amount, according to the book at that time, something like 6,000 rubles. This means for several years I have accumulated this. It was good…

V. DYMARSKY: So, after all, there was some kind of accounting.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes. No, no, it was an account and it mattered in the life of the soldiers. Maybe not the last. But many soldiers, when this payment was increased from the summer of 1944, they began to send 100-200 rubles to their parents and wives every month. This mattered to those who worked in the rear.

V. DYMARSKY: And the post office worked, right?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes, it mattered.

V. DYMARSKY: Well, we have now had the first part of the conversation. Let me remind you that our guest is Igor Mikhailovich Krivoguz, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, author of the book "Soldier's Memoirs". I even have a book here. This is a collection, which included, among other things, the memoirs of Igor Mikhailovich. And in a few minutes we will continue our conversation.

V. DYMARSKY: Once again, I welcome our television and radio audience. The program "The Price of Victory" and I, its presenter Vitaly Dymarsky. Igor Mikhailovich Krivoguz, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, war soldier and author of "Soldier's Memoirs" is in our program studio today.

Igor Mikhailovich, well, in the first part we talked about such everyday things, perhaps, right? I will still continue on the same topic. Until now, there are disputes about the role played by the same Lend-Lease. But you, as a soldier, did you feel that there was some kind of uniform or food, all this came from the Americans, or did it not matter to you at all, did you not think about it?

I. KRIVOGUZ: We felt it. It made a big difference. But I will present these facts. The whole brigade, it was a rifle brigade, but it was part of those famous guards corps that fought near Moscow in early 1942, there was a breakthrough and they barely escaped from the encirclement when the offensive breakthrough of our troops had already dried up. They arrived in the Caucasus and were dressed in either English or American uniforms, because ours was not there. Well, we didn’t have shoulder straps then, it was 1942, so they walked without any insignia. Well, the officers wore kubari and sleepers on their buttonholes, while the rest did not have any insignia. Well, sergeants have triangles, that goes without saying. But others didn't. And this form was thoroughly worn out by the summer of 1943, thoroughly worn out. And then they began to give out our uniforms on the sly. But we received cans of canned meat - "Prem", and some other names, I don't remember now. This gave us a ration. And so we knew that we were eating overseas snacks. Overseas snacks, yes. And then, when they reorganized, two brigades were merged into a division, this happened with us in August, just on August 8, 1943, near Voronezh in the forests, then we were given equipment, American vehicles - Studebakers, Willis and so on. And this technique was worn out and ditched through the mud of Ukraine later on the offensive. We couldn't do anything without her. We replaced it, mainly, with German trophy tractors - to carry artillery. German armored personnel carriers that fell into our hands - the armor was dismantled, and the tracked tractors were excellent tractors. Only dozens of American vehicles remained in our division and division, and there were about a hundred of them at first. So it was a sensitive support for us in 1943 and 1944, technical support. And it cannot be underestimated. I was just learning to drive a Studebaker for the first time. So to say, then I mastered it all, because it was necessary to replace the driver sometimes to drive. That's the way it is. The impression was, of course, the best. But for our roads and our dirt, even the Studebakers were rather weak. In the end, the Ukrainian thaw, the spring of 1944 - it was death for them. All the gears flew there, the motors wore out. Moreover, to be honest, our drivers were not highly qualified. Although sometimes craftsmen took over and repaired the cars, they continued to exist for a while.

V. DYMARSKY: Igor Mikhailovich, one more question. But soldiers, foremen, sergeants, maybe you generally had some conversations among yourself on more general topics or were you afraid? I mean big politics, allies, opponents and so on and so forth.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Well, of course, everyone expected more from the allies. It is natural that it was hard enough for us and we expected that the allies would do more. It was incomprehensible that they were trampling around in Italy for so long, it was incomprehensible that they were afraid to land there - we crossed the Dnieper, and there they could not cross some kind of English Channel. So in this respect they certainly did not understand why and why, and it seemed that the Allies could and should have done more. But at the same time, if we talk about internal problems, then by the summer of 1944, generally speaking - and our front had just reached the border in the spring of 1944 under the command of Konev, and then Malinovsky took command of the Second Ukrainian Front - we reached the border, and already the soldiers had such a question: why should we go further than the border? Or maybe we should stand here and hold on, and let whoever wants to fight the Germans go on there. But, in general, it was not a general mood, but some asked such questions. I had to explain that it was impossible to defeat the Germans, and it was also impossible to count on the fact that they would leave us alone, and that we had to move on. So to say, there were no international feelings that it was necessary to take and release. What was not, was not. This, so to speak, was inspired by everyone later. And the soldiers themselves did not really feel the brotherhood. Moreover, they saw abroad that when we entered Romania, they say: “Look, this country has been waging war for as many years as we have, but they live like we did and didn’t live before the war.” These were the conversations.

V. DYMARSKY: I just wanted to ask you this question. Because they talk a lot, when our people crossed the border and saw how they live in Europe, there was a certain turn in their brains.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes, it was a great impression. Here's the thing, here's the thing. I remember that our front spent the summer of 1944 on the defensive, we went on the offensive only in August - the battle of Iasi began. And the conversations were like this: well, the war will end ... Before that, they didn’t think about the end of the war - we should drag it, not drag it yet. And here we reached the border, the last offensive, the war would end. I am sitting in the battery, the soldiers are resting. One asks the other: “What do you think, will there be collective farms after the war?” He says: “Yes, I don’t know, ask the foreman.” I have. He says: “And how, foreman, you say, will there be collective farms after the war?” I say… My attitudes were firmly learned at school. I say: “Why shouldn’t they be? It's such a step forward." I was a pretty propagandist man, boy. Then this one says, another interlocutor: “Why are you asking him, he didn’t live on the collective farm, he doesn’t know this!” It was true, I lived in the city. And then I realized that there were some conversations here, and, probably, they were being conducted without me, and, probably, even more frank. The fate of the future collective farms - and there were many collective farmers, former collective farmers with us - they worried them, and by no means in favor of the collective farms.

And when we passed through Romania, Hungary ... Well, in Hungary there were literally beggars near Tisza, but in Romania, especially in its western part, there were German settlements - these farmers lived there, frankly, richly. From the point of view of our collective farmers, this is unbelievable. In the political department, one report was as follows: "The soldiers say that one owner has more than our collective farm." It was amazing - the comfort, the houses are different, and especially in the northern part of Hungary and in Czechoslovakia. Of course, a different way of life, a completely different culture. For example, for the first time I saw a bath in the house there, and I was even a city dweller, and the villagers looked with surprise. They only heard that there are some kind of bathrooms, but here, it turns out, in apartments, houses, especially cottages, which we saw a lot. We were quite surprised and amazed by this, and asked when we can have everything. But no one could imagine it. Because it was absolutely clear that this requires a completely different life, a different atmosphere, a different material security.

V. DYMARSKY: Igor Mikhailovich, now I want to ask you a question not as a soldier, but as a doctor of historical sciences today. How do you think, as a scientist, as a historian, how to explain ... 66 years have already passed since the war, right? Did I count correctly? Correctly I counted. Why are disputes still going on, why is our society in general, I will say even more than that, it is split in many respects on the attitude towards the war, on the history of the war?

I. KRIVOGUZ: First of all, the war left such a scar that could not…

V. DYMARSKY: It will heal.

I. KRIVOGUZ: ... will stop hurting even today. Of course, for young people, schoolchildren, for my great-grandchildren, this is ancient history, whether it was Alexander the Great there or someone else who fought at one time, you can sometimes hear questions like this from them. But the point, in my opinion, is also the fact that even all the soldiers of that war are simply not buried. How many of their remains lie.

V. DYMARSKY: But, nevertheless, people really want to know the truth about the war. It's believed that…

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes, they really want to know the truth, because the roots of everyone, the current generations lie there somewhere, somewhere someone died or someone fought, or there was some kind of misfortune with family. But it's not only that. The fact is that now, perhaps, the deepest basic disease of our society is discord and misunderstanding, insufficient, weak understanding between the mass of the population and the authorities. This gap, I must say, is very typical for Russia in general, probably since the time of Rurik. This is the top, the Varangians who arrived from overseas, and the population, and Oleg, apparently, ordered the Glade tribe to be called Russ. In the annals it is written: "Glades, now recommended by the Russians." Well, probably, there was Oleg's decision that this tribe should be renamed Russ. But it doesn't matter. It is important that this gap for Russia is also characteristic of subsequent times. Take even the times of Grozny - the transformation of Russia into a multinational state. In general, Russia as a state has never been a nation state. Take it - Peter, and the subsequent history ... And the Soviet government, in general, did not eliminate this discord, because the Soviet leadership - I will call it directly - these are communist oligarchs - although it imposed an ideology on the masses, the masses had something other interests and aspirations. Life aspirations are not in the world revolution. And here, just in the Patriotic War, this is the period when the aspirations and interests of the people to the greatest extent coincided with the interests of the country's leadership. This is an exceptional period in the history of Russia. And now it is not. And therefore, the history of the war, the relationship between power and the population, which during the war years was maximum - I will not say that there was a complete coincidence, there was not a complete one, after all, because Stalin used the war in order to expand socialism and then create the foundations of the world system of socialism, this was the beginning of the "cold war" already during the years of the Patriotic War ... But that's not the point. The fact is that this is the most attractive feature of that time. Despite all the horrors and disasters, there was still unity between the leadership and the population. And this is not enough for us, and therefore we remember that time and argue.

V. DYMARSKY: But we remember not only time. Maybe this explains the persisting incomprehensibly why, well, if not love ... love, one might even say, admiration for Stalin.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes, many. I can’t say that this is a common phenomenon, but for many ...

V. DYMARSKY: But quite common.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Why? Because it was a difficult period, bloody, but glorious. And even then, during the war years, I noticed it. As a boy, before the war, in the ninth grade, I read Plekhanov about the communist view of history. This made a huge impression on me. And there the role of the individual was not at all the one that Stalin had. Already. And during the war years, when there were many soldiers, and I myself remembered what happened in the first year of the war, all this was discarded. And we said - "ten Stalinist blows." And I knew how such decisions are made, decisions about strikes and plans are made. That one person doesn't mean anything. Stalin simply approved them, approved them, presided over their development. But they were called Stalinist blows. And it got eaten. And after the war - revelry, propaganda of Stalin's personality. Suffice it to recall what kind of propaganda machine we had created immediately after the war in 1947 - a huge one. Including the all-union society "Knowledge" and a host of others. Millions of lectures were read, tens of millions of listeners of these lectures. Could they have left without a trace? No, it couldn't go unnoticed. And I must say frankly that now, if we talk about the transformations that are underway in our country, and many transformations can be discussed one way or another - different points of view - but I remember Gorky's words: "The sea catches lightning bolts and paints in its abyss." So these frequent reforms, they go out, colliding, firstly, with the circle of bureaucracy. Secondly, with the population, which does not understand what will come of it and whether it will be worse. Therefore, such problems arise when we remember the war. And during the war there was almost a complete coincidence. But still it was not complete. But the maximum in the history of Russia, a thousand-year history, the maximum approximation of the interests of the people and leadership. Because it was necessary to defend the country, their lives. Because Hitler had an idiotic program. If he had acted differently, perhaps he would not have failed, but would have achieved some kind of success. But it is clear that this is a special period in the history of Russia, it is attractive. And his heroes, who are made heroes, retain their significance for many people.

V. DYMARSKY: Igor Mikhailovich, one more question. And the generation of front-line soldiers, the generation of those who went through the war, did not develop some resentment towards Stalin, towards the leadership after the war, that how would this victory begin to be muffled, the significance of victory?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Yes. After all, it is known that it was not Stalin, but after him, that the celebration of Victory Day was introduced, and Brezhnev brought it to such a wonderful thing as all the participants were awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, which, I will say frankly, I do not welcome. Although he also received this order, he did not refuse. But it devalued the actual combat awards, that's the point. And I know one, he died already, however, a participant in the war, he had the Order of the Patriotic War and was proud of it, and then they attach a second one to him, so he says: “Why do I need this one, I got everything I need? And this only devalues my order, what it matters. Therefore, it must be said directly that they did not have time to take offense at Stalin then. We didn’t have time simply because the war of propaganda and even a shadow of resentment against Stalin was surging, it, frankly, would not have met with either sympathy or understanding, and worse than that, frankly, because no one dared to even tell the truth about the war, about what he saw. And so in my memoirs I showed how people lived. Sometimes it was ugly, and the command made God knows what miscalculations and mistakes. I must say that when I worked in the archive, I asked: “Please give me a fund, where all the emergency departments of the SMERSH department are. I wanted to show how "SMERSH" - I did not meet "SMERSH" in the war - how he worked in our division, in particular. They told me: "No, it's a secret, you can't." I took the funds of the political department of the division - there all these cases are analyzed in the most detailed way. All cases of disgrace, criminal activity and so on. So there is no need to look for the SMERSH case, the political departments were obliged to collect information, and this was generalized in political reports. That's how I found a lot of such cases. They did not, of course, determine the face of the army, but they characterized the masses, the moods, and what were the failures, what were the failures. A man remains a man, he is not corrected by the fact that he performs heroic deeds. Sometimes these heroes committed crimes the next day. Such were the cases, and many other unpleasant things. I tried to write it the way it was, and I don't push it to the fore, because it couldn't have been in the foreground. Because in the foreground there was always a struggle, a war, a battle with the enemy. But these cases took place and in order to characterize the life of a soldier, writing a soldier's memoirs cannot be bypassed.

V. DYMARSKY: Did you have direct contact with a German?

I. KRIVOGUZ: Me? Yes. I took prisoners. In general, I do not brag about this, but when I think about what kind of contribution to the war, I measure the contribution to the war not by awards, but by how much I destroyed. I managed to shoot down one German plane, I participated in the shooting down of one German tank and destroyed it, although many fired, I personally saw and destroyed five German soldiers in battle. And also, maybe a dozen or a half, when a lot of people were shooting, and who beat ...

V. DYMARSKY: It is not clear who.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Sometimes even like this, if different units fired, the rapports were written from both sides. Each attributed to himself.

V. DYMARSKY: Thank you, Igor Mikhailovich, for this conversation. I will remind our TV viewers and radio listeners that we talked today with Igor Mikhailovich Krivoguz, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, author of the book "Soldier's Memoirs". It was published both as a separate edition and in this collection under the title “The Desired Word “Victory”. And here, including in this collection of soldiers' memoirs, soldiers' memoirs, there is also the contribution of our today's guest. I thank you for this conversation, Igor Mikhailovich.

I. KRIVOGUZ: Thank you.

V. DYMARSKY: You, dear audience, for your attention. There was a program "The Price of Victory", see you in a week.

Current page: 1 (the book has a total of 16 pages) [available reading excerpt: 11 pages]

Artem Drabkin
"Trench Truth" of the Wehrmacht. War through the eyes of the enemy

To the reader

Hero of the Soviet Union, Major General S. M. Kramarenko

Foreword

Separately, I want to say thanks to Anna Yakupova, who took care of organizing numerous flights, transfers, hotels. Without her help, the work would have been much more difficult.

Evert Gottfried

Simultaneous translation - Anastasia Pupynina

Translation of the recording - Valentin Seleznev

– I was born in 1921, so when the war started, I was 18 years old. I was supposed to be called up in the fall of 1940, but they called me ahead of schedule, and already in December 1939 I entered the second infantry regiment of the eleventh infantry division in Allenstein, in East Prussia. With this regiment, in the rank of corporal, I participated in the French campaign. To be honest, I did not have to participate in the battles in France. Our division was in reserve and marched behind. But we walked incredibly much on foot behind the advancing units. When sealing the boiler near Dunkirk, our regiment traveled 150 kilometers in 48 hours! This is madness! The French campaign was won by motorized units, not by infantry. After the war in France, the whole division was transferred back to East Prussia, to my homeland.

Already in January 1941, I entered the military school in Potsdam, where I studied for five months, and in May I returned to my regiment with the rank of lieutenant. I received an infantry platoon in the regiment. I went through the whole war with my regiment. He was wounded seven times, but always came back. And he left it only in the autumn of 1944, when he was seriously wounded in Courland - a mine explosion almost blew off my foot. This ended my war.

– Before the war with the Soviet Union started, did you have a feeling that it would start soon?

- No, absolutely not. I was going to enter the university in the spring of 1941. I studied a lot and was very surprised when the war began. By night marches we reached the border with the USSR. For at least a week they walked at night and reached the Lithuanian border around June 20, quite shortly, a couple of days before the start of the war. We didn't know at all what was ahead of us. During this march, there were thousands of rumors. According to one version, the Soviet Union was supposed to give us a passage through the Caucasus to Persia and from there to Africa. The fact that we will attack Russia never occurred to anyone.

In the evening, a few hours before the start of the war, Hitler's address was read to us. It was said that tomorrow at three in the morning we were advancing, ammunition was issued, and the case began. Everything was very fast. There was no opportunity to think about anything. I remember that in the evening an old sergeant-major came up to me and somehow very uncertainly and surprised asked: “Tell me, Lieutenant, maybe you can explain to me why we are attacking Russia?” What could I explain?! Such an order! We were very surprised. The fact that at the top, the management, knew, this is understandable. But for us, downstairs, it was a complete surprise. Full! But as a soldier, you receive an order and march to fulfill it - it's understandable.

We launched our offensive from the Krombach forest, located on the former Prussian-Lithuanian frontier.

Our company was on bicycles, because, according to the experience of the French campaign, in each infantry regiment one company was put on bicycles. In the first days of the war, I traveled insanely a lot, but in the end it was decided to abandon them, since there were no roads for them. In Russia, you cannot wage war on bicycles.

The first battle was with Russian border guards. The border outpost took up defensive positions in equipped trenches. The first losses, the first prisoners. Despite the resistance, that day we walked 30 kilometers across Lithuania. A few days later we reached the Jura River near the town of Payuris. By this time the regiment had already lost five officers.

On the Jura, they had to storm the concrete bunker of the fortified area. The pillboxes were not yet ready, not camouflaged, but were already occupied by troops. The river crossing and the assault were not easy, and we had very sensitive losses. The Russian soldiers, as expected, fought very bravely and were very resilient in defense. It was hard for them. But from the very beginning, from the first heavy battles, we got used to defeating them.

On the third day, intensive counterattacks by Russian tank units began. As I found out later, it was the 12th mechanized corps. On the Dubyssa River, we were attacked by KV-2, Klim Woroschilow (hereinafter, words pronounced in Russian are highlighted in Latin. - A. Drabkin) number two. He has such a gun 15 centimeters! Huge tank! Absolutely, absolutely invincible! The infantry could only run away from him. Nothing could be done about him! Only an 8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun could handle it. This tank appeared on the bridge over the Dubica. He crossed the bridge, crushed our anti-tank guns, one or two, and you're done. Fortunately, then he got stuck. They were extremely heavy and unmaneuverable.

There were intense battles with Russian T-26 tanks, but we fought them off with our anti-tank weapons. This 12th mechanized corps was subsequently defeated by our tank units. When we were marching on Riga, three Russian cars unexpectedly drove out of the forest and joined our column. They were surrounded, and those who were in them were taken prisoner. One of the prisoners was a general, the commander of this same 12th mechanized corps. He didn't know we'd come this far.

“Describes the head of the 15th company of the 3rd infantry regiment of the 21st infantry division, Lieutenant Ritgen (Ritgen): “It happened at 10.30 in the forest near Kekava (Kekai), about 20 km from Riga, when there was a brief stop . Subdivisions and units, somewhat stretched out due to the fast pace, closed up and lined up for an attack and a throw on Riga ... While they were standing, an incident occurred that was characteristic of the situation at that time. The sound of motors was heard from the forest, and before we realized what was happening, three closed cars rolled out of the forest clearing onto our highway. Command, recall, weapons at the ready, excitement here and there, and the riddle is already solved. The Russian corps headquarters, without suspecting anything, fell into our march column and was instantly surrounded by our soldiers. Resistance and flight were impossible. So cheaply in the future, we never captured Russian generals - they had to join our march column with their vehicles and, under guard, participate in the throw to Riga. Who then was captured here, no one guessed. Today it is quite clear - Major General Shestopalov, commander of the 12th mechanized corps with its closest headquarters.(Comment from the VIF2 forum.)

It must be said that in the north it was not possible to encircle the Russian forces. The Russians retreated in order and under orders. They blew up all the bridges.

When they took Riga, I was in the forward detachment, made up of a motorized unit and our company. Our goal was the bridges near Riga. The toughest fights. The bridge we were supposed to take flew up in front of me. I didn't run 15 meters to him. More than 30 people died in our company that day.

During the capture of Riga, my company lost all its officers. The company commander was killed, two platoonmen were wounded. I was appointed company commander, but a few days later I was wounded. So I did not command a company for long, and I was too young for this. How did it hurt me? In the city, Volzakov looked around the corner of the house and suddenly saw that a Russian soldier was sitting on the fence of some kind of garden. Seeing me, he jumped up and threw a hand grenade. She exploded next to me. My whole side was in pieces. The first aid was provided by the regiment's doctor, and then I was sent to the Lithuanian hospital in Šiauliai. There I had several operations, the fragments were pulled out. From Šiauliai I was transported by plane to Koenigsberg, and already in August I was back in the regiment.

When he returned from the hospital, he was in various positions, adjutant of the battalion, platoon in different companies. We had such losses that in May 1942 the regiment became a two-battalion.

– Were your main losses from small arms or artillery?

- From the rifleman. From artillery at first it was less, but then the main losses were from artillery.

- How can you assess who was more effective among the Germans - infantry or artillery, from whom the Russians suffered more?

The Russians suffered from our artillery. We had excellent spotters and a high concentration of fire. So, when the infantry went on the offensive, the resistance was already broken.

When we entered Russia, the real battles began there. Near Soltsy, our division came under a counterattack. At that time I was in the hospital, but then I heard stories about how the headquarters of our division was attacked. Thank God, the division commander was not there, he was ahead. Losses were very big. For example, in the neighboring division, which was following us, soldiers gathered at the field kitchen during lunch. At that moment, they were attacked. The result - 46 corpses in the company. At first we were careless, but quickly learned. As a result of these battles, there was a big trial.

– How did the local population in the Baltics meet you?

“The local people were very, very happy with us. When we crossed the Lithuanian-Latvian border, we were greeted with pies and cold milk from a stream. I ate a hot pirog and washed it down with cold milk, and as a result, I badly ruined my stomach.

– You can often hear from German soldiers that Russian soldiers were very cruel. What can you say about this?

- Already on the third day of the war, soldiers from a neighboring regiment were captured. The Russians gouged out their eyes and killed them all. One sergeant pretended to be dead and then told. This became widely known, and from the very beginning there was a fear that in captivity they would be mistreated, mocked. This attitude was almost until the very end of the war. We were more afraid of being captured than of dying. Only at the end of the war it became quite the opposite.

– Have you seen Russian soldiers surrender in an organized manner, in units?

“I didn't see it myself. We took quite a few prisoners, in addition, there were a lot of defectors. We always knew the plans of the Russian side, because the defectors always told us. This continued until the end of the war. Of course, when the Russians began to succeed, there were fewer defectors, but still there were. Because they were afraid, they knew that when they attacked they would meet strong resistance. They were afraid for their lives, and this is understandable.

– Has anyone defected to the Russians in your company or battalion?

- Yes. In my company in the winter of 1941/42, one defected to the side of the Russians. He was an old communist, but we didn't know that. He was a politically convinced man, an absolute opponent of the regime. One day he disappeared, and then we got leaflets with his appeal. So we learned his fate. But it was very, very rare. One didn’t manage to run across at all, the Russians sent him back, didn’t take him, they were afraid that he would run back again, he couldn’t prove to them that he was their friend.

In August, we took Novgorod and were supposed to advance further east, but this offensive was canceled, and we went along the Volkhov River and the high road north, in the direction of Chudovo. In September we were north of Chudovo, not far from Kirishi. This city had a large oil refinery.

“In the 1920s, railway traffic was opened along the Leningrad - Mga - Sonkovo line, a bridge was built across the river. Volkhov and the Kirishi railway station arose. Around the station, the construction of a working settlement began, which was also called Kirishi. A factory of standard housing construction was built in it and the construction of a large timber and chemical plant and a match factory began (it was interrupted by the war).

In 1961, the construction of an oil refinery began in Kirishi. In 1963, the Kirishi construction site was declared the All-Union shock Komsomol construction site.(Comment from the VIF2 forum.)

It so happened that we were stuck in this place until the beginning of 1943. They stomped back and forth, in one place.

– Why, from your point of view, was the Soviet side able to stop your offensive?

- Yes, they succeeded simply because we ran out of strength. From the north, for example, the entire first tank group was transferred to the center. And we did not have any motorized and tank units left, only infantry divisions. Nevertheless, we could have advanced further, but the winter began, for which we were completely unprepared. Before the start of winter, we were still advancing in the direction of Volkhovstroy, in which there was a large power plant. And in the winter we got stuck there because we were cold, we didn’t have any winter clothes at all.

– What percentage of new soldiers was by autumn?

- Hard to say. There were 180 people in the infantry company, 40 of them in the convoy, about 150 people fought in three platoons. But this number was only at the beginning. Then there were 60-80 people in the companies. After June 22, we were never fully stocked again. By autumn, the losses amounted to two-thirds of the total. There were 48 people in the platoon, by the autumn of those with whom I started the campaign, only 10 remained, taking into account the fact that many, like me, were returning from hospitals to their unit. The rest are new. Each division had a reserve battalion, from which soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to companies depending on losses. It must be said that the division received its first full reserve battalion only in November 1941. Before that, individual fighters came, as, for example, I flew in from the hospital. By this time the companies were already very weak.

– At the end of autumn, before the onset of winter, what was the mood in the infantry?

- We have already lost many, but when there are successes, the mood is good. In October, the period of thaw began. The division stood between Chudov and Volkhovstroy.

We couldn't move forward. Then we continued the offensive in the direction of Tikhvin. We advanced, every day we took a village or two, we advanced again and again, with great difficulty, with heavy losses, but still we advanced.

Then winter came with these terrible frosts, and morale fell, although there were still forces to advance. Imagine: 40 degrees below zero, and instead of winter clothes you have only an unlined overcoat, thin pants and boots. No fufaek with cotton wool! We didn't even have winter hats! There were caps that we wrapped over our ears, but this did not help. It was fucking cold! You are freezing, thinking not about the war, but about how to survive, how to keep warm, about nothing else. Under such conditions, the offensive ends quickly. The Russians launched a counteroffensive, and our units, which were in Tikhvin, were to retreat to the Moscow-Leningrad railway line. On the railway line we had a defensive position.

In the second winter, we got winter boots with fur, real winter clothes. But, I must say, the second winter was not as cold as the first.

– How did you escape the cold in the first winter? Were there any tricks?

- Haha. Against the cold there are no tricks ... The legs froze very quickly. If you have leather boots and walk knee-deep in snow, the snow melts on your skin, water seeps through your pores, and your feet are wet. Boots freeze in the cold. If your feet are frozen at minus 30, then the next morning you have no legs. Frostbite losses were much higher than combat losses. Therefore, they put paper in boots. Felt boots were removed from the fallen Russian soldiers. I personally did not do this, but I can imagine that someone changed their boots for felt boots from prisoners of war.

It was during the attack on Volkhovstroy. I was then the adjutant of the battalion. We came to the settlement Glashevo to spend the night. They lit a fire. I took off my completely wet boots and put them on the fire to dry. The next morning I found that they had shrunken and were very small. I could not put them on and, in order to pull them on, I began to beat my foot on the wall until I drove it into my boot. I did the same with the second boot. He took one step, there was a crack, and pieces of skin flew off both soles. I stayed in my socks. I did not know what to do, but then, fortunately, our supply officer, a sergeant major, came, I asked him if he happened to have boots. He figured out my foot size and gave me brand new boots, even never polished. I was happy! He threw out my old boots, put on new ones, and eight days later he was already in the hospital in new boots with a new wound. There is no protection against the cold if there is no proper clothing. We didn't even have blankets. Sleeping in the forest at minus 30, when there is no blanket, only a thin coat, is deadly.

– Russian soldiers received vodka to keep warm every day. At you had something similar?

- Vodka? Alcohol? Yes, sometimes cognac was brought from Riga, but not from the cold. Alcohol in the cold does not warm, but kills. It is only at first moment it seems that it is warm.

– Was there hot food all the time?

- Yes. Our field cookery learned from the Russians. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, there were German observers on the Russian side. There they saw the first field kitchens. They found that by preparing the food during the march rather than after it, the speed of the march was doubled. Field kitchens were immediately copied by the German army, and in 1914 our active army was armed with them. The kitchens worked great! With them, the company could make a daily march of thirty kilometers.

– In the fall, how was it explained to you that the blitzkrieg did not work?

“Ha ha, they didn’t explain anything to us. We had to keep fighting whether we wanted to or not. Of course, we noticed, ha ha, that the blitzkrieg did not work, but the war went on, it was necessary to fight.

– Was the attitude of the local population in Russia different from what it was in the Baltics?

- I would say that during the offensive, we did not particularly communicate with the local population. But in the defense, for example, near Chudovo on the Chudovo-Leningrad line, where we stood for a long time, there were a lot of civilians. This civilian population worked in our carts. For food, they washed our clothes and helped us with the housework. There were very good, reasonable relations.

– How was it with hairdressers, did you wear mustaches or beards?

- Not. We usually had short hair, but not as short as in the Red Army, but normal short hair, badly cut because there was no way. We were also shaved badly.

Of course, we tried to be as clean as possible, but you can't be clean in a dirty trench. In the offensive and in the retreat, this is generally impossible. It is especially bad in the retreat - at least there are pauses in the offensive. We very quickly learned from the Russians how to build a sauna or a banja. In 1941 I had already built the first banja. We tried to wash at least once a week, or when there was an opportunity. During the day, often nothing happened, it was quiet, and we stepped back, steamed, sweated, put on clean underwear, tried to get rid of lice. When I was adjutant of a battalion whose headquarters was located in the relative rear, everything was much simpler. There we had reasonable facilities, it was possible to wash and shave daily. And when you sit in a hole, it is impossible. But we tried to wash and stay clean. If you do not wash, then the soldier quickly fails. And I had one soldier who in this way tried to make himself unfit for service. Didn't wash, tried to get scabies and end up in the hospital. My non-commissioned officers made him wash every morning.

– Were there HIVIs in your battalion?

- Yes. Two or three people per company. They helped bring water, stoked the stoves, looked after the horses, worked in the wagon train. The losses were heavy, there were not enough people, so they replaced the Germans in auxiliary work. They had no weapons, they did not participate in the battles. I know that many of them built roads. Gati paved through the swamps. They were very good people who always walked beside us even in retreat. We knew each other, we lived together, and the relationship was very good. No problem.

– What weapons did you have in your platoon?

– There were three rifle companies and a company of heavy weapons in the battalion. The heavy company had two platoons of heavy machine guns and one platoon of 81mm mortars. An infantry platoon of a rifle company usually had four squads, each squad of 10 people, commanded by a non-commissioned officer with a submachine gun, one light machine gun, the rest had carbines. In 1943, we received a new weapon - automatic carbines - stormtroopers. In our regiment, their army tests were carried out. Our battalion was the first to be completely re-equipped with assault rifles. This is a wonderful weapon that gave an incredible increase in combat capabilities! They had short cartridges, so more ammunition could be taken. With her, every person became practically a machine gunner. At first they had childhood illnesses, but they were corrected. Machine guns were even confiscated from us, but at the end of 1943, near Kolpino, we found that with these rifles, we cannot do without machine guns in defense, and very quickly machine guns were brought back. So the platoon had machine guns and assault rifles. We didn't have any other weapons. At the very beginning of the war, the company also had 5-centimeter mortars, but they were very quickly removed from service, firstly, because they were very heavy, and secondly, because you can’t take a lot of ammunition with you - also very heavy.

– Is it true that the machine gun was the main weapon in defense?

- Yes. Well, artillery, of course. The main defensive weapon is still artillery. She bears the brunt. The infantry moves in later if something unexpected happens. The main weapons of the infantry in defense are a carbine, assault rifles, a light machine gun and a heavy machine gun, on a gun carriage. We had two more special companies in the infantry regiment - an anti-tank company, with 3-, 7- and 5-centimeter anti-tank guns and one company of infantry guns, out of two light platoons - six light, 7.5-centimeter guns, and one platoon heavy guns 15 cm, which were directly subordinate to infantry commanders. They were always with us, it was, of course, a very big boost.

– What were the commanders armed with?

- The commanders of platoons and companies had submachine guns. There were also pistols. I had a P-38 "Walter".

– Hand grenades?

- Yes, of course, "mallets", they were later removed from service. In 1942 there were egg-pomegranates. They were given out as needed, when necessary, on the march they were transported in cars, the soldiers had enough luggage. They were issued for the attack. We carried them in a waist bag, less often in a backpack, so that there was a reserve.

– Did the weapon fail in winter?

- Yes, in winter, at low temperatures, the lubricant froze and the weapon did not work, but this problem was easy to deal with - you just had to completely remove the lubricant. A matter of experience - we quickly learned this. The guns worked great. The MG-42 was a first-class, very good machine gun, it never failed.

Memoirs, memoirs… Who writes them? What memoirs can those who actually fought have? Pilots, tankers and, above all, infantrymen? Injury is death, injury is death, injury is death – and that's it! There was no other. Memoirs are written by those who were near the war. In the second echelon, at headquarters. Or corrupt hacks expressing the official point of view ...

Memoirs of an ordinary soldier of the Great Patriotic War is a relatively rare event. The relatively low level of general literacy, the severity of the trials, the lack of time and opportunity to delve into what was happening, the direct prohibitions on keeping diaries during the war years - all this made the likelihood of the memories of privates and sergeants extremely low. And what can a simple soldier remember if all his strength and energy were spent on completing the task and staying alive at the same time? The war of an ordinary is 500 meters to the enemy, the same to the rear, to the battalion commander and several hundred meters along the front of the company. This is a task of the form "reach landmark number 3 - a fallen birch, dig in and wait for orders." Everything, nothing more. Therefore, a soldier's memoirs are, first of all, a story about those people with whom they had to share the last cracker, who collected shag dust in their pockets to roll up a goat's leg, who walked alongside those very half a kilometer to the enemy and who lay down in the damp earth ... But it's hard to remember, because pain and suffering lurk behind every episode. In the early 70s of the last century, Konstantin Simonov spent hundreds of hours interviewing full holders of the Order of Glory. It would seem that honored people with a lot of feats - sit and tell! But, reading the interview, you suddenly realize that Simonov has to literally pull the story out of the characters with ticks, and only a competent question for a short time makes the veteran plunge into the past and give out some interesting details.

War is a severe trauma for the psyche of any person. Those who could not cope with it committed suicide, took to drink, went into crime. Their life path was short and tragic. Most struggled with it for the rest of their lives. Let's leave the classification of ways to overcome military psychological trauma to professional psychologists, however, over 15 years of work on the iremember.ru website, having interviewed more than 2,000 people, we can note several ways that veterans mainly resort to in order to preserve their personality and prevent the horrors of war from destroying it:

Dissociation is the separation of oneself from the trauma. At the same time, the story about the war turns into a continuous anecdote and consists mainly of searching for food and drink, funny stories about meetings with the enemy and commanders.

Suppression is the active repression of negative memories. These are the same veterans who "never talked about the war." If such a person agrees to an interview, then his story is extremely cruel and filled with details.

Cancellation - the war is simply erased from the memory of a person. This approach is typical for women participating in the war, but it also happens with men.

Displacement is a form of psychological defense, in which a negative emotional reaction is directed not at the situation that caused the psychic trauma, but at objects that have nothing to do with the psychological trauma. Most often these are people with whom the veteran himself did not communicate or situations in which he did not participate.

We will consider the latter method of a person’s struggle with military trauma in more detail, since it is precisely this method that is vividly presented on the pages of Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikulin’s memoirs “Memories of the War” (State Hermitage Museum - 2nd ed. - St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Publishing House, 2008). The author himself does not hide this:

« In this manuscript, I was solving only personal problems. When I returned from the war wounded, shell-shocked and depressed, I could not cope with it right away. In those days, there was no concept of “Vietnamese syndrome” or “Afghan syndrome”, and we were not treated by psychologists. Everyone was saved as best they could."

Any memoir is an extremely subjective thing. Often they were written for fellow soldiers, and the task of the memoirist was not to forget or miss a single name, so as not to offend a good person. But there are also those that are written for themselves in order to justify their actions, "to lighten the soul", etc. Nikolai Nikulin does not hide this either, reporting that he wrote down his memoirs in order to expel all the abomination of the war from himself. It turned out to expel brilliantly, but the sincerity of the author is questionable. First of all, Nikulin's description of the people with whom the war brought him together causes rejection. If a person in the description of the author is a skilled warrior and a good specialist, then he is necessarily an alcoholic, a rapist, endowed with physical disabilities, and so on. If the description of a person begins with positive qualities - expect trouble: it is almost inevitable, as in a bad detective story, there will be the last bastard. There is not a single mention of women in the war from a positive point of view in the book - this is exclusively an object of sexual harassment. And here we must once again postulate: the view of the memoirist is the view of his soul. If a person is sharpened only to see the negative, he will not be able to see anything else. The included psychological defense in the form of displacement does not allow the author not only to be objective, but makes him seek out, savor, and sometimes even think out negative situations and actions.

Analyzing these memoirs is very difficult. In one form or another, we took on the review of his book several times, and each time it ended in nothing after a few lines written. However, the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Victory raised the degree of controversy about the value of the book to a boiling point, and we still considered it necessary to speak out. In recent years, Nikulin's memoirs have been laid out on the table in any discussion about the veracity of certain memories of the war as the main trump card, after which the dispute often turns into personalities. The attitude of different readers to the book is strictly opposite: depending on the degree of enlightenment in matters of military history and political preferences, this is either “one of the few books with the“ real ”truth about the war, or“ a dirty libel written with the aim of discrediting the memory of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War ".

We made attempts to analyze Nikulin's book solely on the basis of documents from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF), however, the low military rank and position of the author of the memoirs did not allow us to complete this task in full and fully trace his military path. I managed to find only a couple of mentions of Sergeant Nikulin personally, but more on that later. Nevertheless, the study of documents gave a general idea of the events described in the book, and also made it possible to obtain confirmation or refutation of some episodes.

It should be said right away that photographic accuracy when mentioning 30 years later (the book was written in 1975) dates, surnames, geographical names allow us to assume with great certainty that the author of the memoirs kept diary entries at the front. It is the episodes described using them that “fit into the TsAMO documents” very well, but the appearance of figures of speech like “our colonel”, “our commissar” or “hospital bed neighbor” should immediately alert, since they mostly promise only repetition of tales that wandered along the entire front, as they say, "from the Barents to the Black Sea." Some of them are equipped with turnovers that remove responsibility from the author (“I was told”), but some are described in the first person.

So let's start with the preface:

“My notes were not intended for publication. This is just an attempt to get rid of the past: just as in Western countries people go to a psychoanalyst, lay out their worries, their worries, their secrets to him in the hope of healing and finding peace, I turned to paper to scrape out the abomination that was deeply embedded there from the backstreets of memory , dregs and disgusting, to free myself from the memories that oppressed me. The attempt is certainly unsuccessful, hopeless ... "

Paper, as you know, "endures everything", and its use in psychotherapy has been tried and tested for a long time and successfully. That's just the result of this hardest inner work that a traumatized person does on himself, pouring out his experiences on paper, it really would not be worth making public, at least in its original form.

“These notes are deeply personal, written for myself, and not for an outsider's eye, and therefore extremely subjective. They cannot be objective because the war was experienced by me almost in childhood, in the complete absence of life experience, knowledge of people, in the complete absence of defensive reactions or immunity from the blows of fate. .

An absolutely honest and accurate remark that should alert those who are trying to present Nikulin's book as the ultimate truth and as the only true book about the war. However, this is just one of the views on the war, where all people are bastards, lice and smelly, where all thoughts are only about delicious food and a warm bed, where there are only corpses and dirt around. However, there are other points of view of people who coped with trauma in a different way or even got rid of it. An excellent example is the memoirs of Mansur Abdulin “From Stalingrad to the Dnieper”, Vasily Bryukhov “Armor-piercing, fire!” and many others.

“My view of the events of those years is not directed from above, not from the general’s bell tower, from where everything is visible, but from below, from the point of view of a soldier crawling on his belly through front-line mud, and sometimes sticking his nose into this mud. Naturally, I saw little and saw specifically.

It is difficult to say whether the author deliberately violated this declaration, or whether he simply could not resist the temptation to express his views on tactics and strategy, but there are plenty of descriptions of how commanders of all ranks up to the Supreme Commander should have acted correctly in this or that situation in this or that situation. . Here are just a couple of examples:

“... The colonel knows that the attack is useless, that there will only be new corpses. Already in some divisions only headquarters and three or four dozen people remained. There were cases when a division, starting a battle, had 6 – 7 thousand bayonets, and at the end of the operation her losses were 10 – 12 thousand - due to constant replenishment! And there were never enough people! The operational map of Pogostya is strewn with unit numbers, but there are no soldiers in them ... Well, if the colonel tries to think over and prepare an attack, check if everything possible has been done. And often he is simply mediocre, lazy, drunk. Often he does not want to leave the warm shelter and climb under the bullets ... "

“From the headquarters, according to the map, General Fedyuninsky commanded the army, giving the divisions an approximate direction of attack ».

To paraphrase a well-known quote, let's say: "comrade of the guard sergeant simplifies."

One can enumerate such knowledge about the actions of commanders endlessly. However, let us return to the first military memoirs of the author:

“The scene of sending the marines stuck in my memory: right in front of our windows overlooking the Neva, soldiers, fully armed and equipped, were loaded onto a pleasure boat. They were calmly waiting for their turn, and suddenly a woman ran up to one of them with a loud cry. She was persuaded, reassured, but to no avail. The soldier tore off his convulsively clenched hands by force, and she continued to cling to the duffel bag, the rifle, the gas mask bag. The boat sailed away, and the woman howled drearily for a long time, hitting her head on the granite parapet of the embankment. She felt what I learned much later: neither the soldiers, nor the boats on which they were sent to the landing, never returned.

Here we see a mistake, typical not only for the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin, but also for other memoirs, when a logical construction is made on the basis of an insufficient number of facts. Yesterday's schoolboy Nikolai sees and acutely experiences the scene of farewell. He no longer sees this boat and, most likely, information reaches him that one of the boats (maybe even this one) was sunk by enemy fire, and those on it died. Over time, these events lined up in a logical chain "sending - a woman - death." Perhaps Nikolai witnessed the loading of the participants in the Peterhof landing, of which practically none survived, but this does not give him the right to generalize.

“The barge, meanwhile, proceeded along the Neva and beyond. On the Volkhov, according to rumors, it was bombed and drowned by the Messerschmitts. The militias were sitting in the holds, the hatches of which the prudent authorities ordered to be locked - so that, what good, they would not run away, my dears!

It's good that the note "according to rumors" was added to the description of the episode, removing any responsibility for the authenticity of the author. It is difficult to understand the logic of the actions of bloodthirsty and stupid commanders - volunteers from the Leningrad militia are driven into the holds under the indispensable lock. To not change their minds, forgetting that they are volunteers? As in the previous case, who told the author about the episode? The militias who died in the locked holds, those who locked them there, or did the German pilots boast? The reader of this book should be very careful to trace the source of the author's information. Rumors, or “word of mouth”, is the Internet of that time. They were spontaneously born and died, and the more difficult the situation at the front, the more incredible the assumptions were. Even at the end of the war, there was talk that a peace treaty would be concluded with the Germans. Synkova Vera Savelyevna recalls how the Germans entered their village: “By that time, rumors were actively circulating in the village - they said that those who had their hair cut off would be shot. And, unfortunately, I have short hair. What to do?! The store had a wooden pelvis, I put it on my head and began to make my way home through the garden. There were hundreds of such stories, and an attempt to build a narrative on them will only lead to a distortion of reality.

“... What a funny sergeant: “Yeah, you know two languages! All right, let's go clean the restroom!" The lessons of the sergeant were remembered for a lifetime. When I confused the right and left sides when turning in the ranks, the sergeant instructed me: “This is not a university for you, you need to think with your head here!”

The sergeant had to be not only funny, but also very observant - how did he manage to determine by the appearance of the Red Army soldier Nikulin that he spoke two languages? Usually such details become the cause of ridicule and bullying, being mentioned out of place - do not emphasize knowledge of languages when it is not asked for. One important clarification needs to be made here: Nikolai Nikulin grew up in the city, in an intelligent family and, probably, was deprived of the opportunity to communicate with simple and semi-literate people, who were the majority in the Soviet Union in the early 40s. A person who had four grades of elementary school, that is, who knew how to read and write somehow and knew simple arithmetic operations, could count on a career as a junior commander, and with some luck and diligence, to receive secondary vocational and even higher education. Life in the pre-war years was difficult, so the upbringing of sergeants and foremen was not always good. And certainly, they had nothing to love for arrogant youngsters who grew up on everything ready and graduated from high school, for which, since 1940, they were supposed to pay.

“In August, things at the front near Leningrad became bad, the division went to the forefront, and with it - half of our courses as replenishment. All of them soon burned down in battles.

There are many such generalizations throughout the text. The author easily extrapolates his personal experience or the experience of people who told him to the entire Red Army, the Soviet people and the country as a whole. A lot of Nikulin's value judgments are based not on a system of facts, but on isolated special cases. Therefore, great attention is required from the reader in order to try to separate facts from conjectures and generalizations when studying the book. Just one more example:

“... The best of all was the fate of those who ended up in the communications regiments. There they worked at radio stations until the end of the war and almost all of them survived. Worst of all had enlisted in rifle divisions: “Oh, you are radio operators,” they said, “here are your rifles, and here is the height. There are Germans! The task is to capture the height!

A good memoirist should still speak only for himself!

“... The Badaev food warehouses were on fire. At that time, we still could not know that this fire would decide the fate of a million residents of the city who would die of starvation in the winter of 1941. – 1942" .

Now it is known for sure that the fire of the Badaevsky warehouses did not solve anything. There really were huge stocks of food stored there, but in reality, taking into account the supply of the entire city, they could be enough for a maximum of a week. Whether these products would have saved extra lives or not is hard to say. Be that as it may, on September 8, when the Germans bombed the Badaev warehouses, the first barges with food were already on their way to Leningrad along Ladoga. But that's a completely different story.

The description of one's own appearance and abilities looks unsightly:

“I was a useless soldier. In the infantry, I would either have been shot immediately as an example, or I myself would have died of weakness, tumbling headlong into the fire: many charred corpses remained at the site of the camps of the units that arrived from hungry Leningrad. In the regiment, they probably despised me, but they tolerated me.

“... I was already a dystrophic and stood out among the soldiers with my pitiful appearance” ... “Over time, I combed my skinny sides into the blood, and scabs formed in place of scratching” ... “I collected crackers and crusts near warehouses, kitchens - in a word, I got food wherever he could."

“For me, Pogostye was a turning point in my life. There I was killed and crushed. There I gained absolute confidence in the inevitability of my own death. But there was my revival in a new capacity. I lived as if in a delirium, thinking badly, poorly aware of what was happening. The mind seemed to have faded and barely warmed in my hungry, exhausted body.

“... In gratitude for the service, the head of the dining room gave us a large vat with leftovers from the officer's breakfast. We devoured them with delight, despite the cigarette butts that occasionally came across in barley porridge.

“... Sooty, swollen, dirty dystrophic, I could not work properly, had neither vigor nor bearing. My pitiful figure expressed only despondent despair. Brothers in arms either silently snorted disapprovingly and turned away from me, or expressed their feelings with a strong obscenity: “Here’s a bastard stuck on our neck!”

Judging by the descriptions of relationships with colleagues scattered in the book here and there, Nikolai Nikulin not only did not enjoy authority, but was at least an object of ridicule, and at the most despised. The male army team is a very tough environment, and if it turns out that “your place is at the bucket,” then you can get out of this place only by changing a part, which the author succeeds at the end of the war. So it is not surprising that colleagues do not like someone who is useless to them and whose share of the difficulties they have to take on. There is nothing surprising in the fact that this dislike is mutual, and that is why all the people of Nikolai Nikulin look unsightly - as they say, Alaverdi!

“...Now this operation, as “unsuccessful”, is forgotten. And even General Fedyuninsky, who commanded the 54th Army at that time, bashfully silent about it in his memoirs, mentioning, however, that it was "the most difficult, most difficult time" in his military career ».

We are talking about the unsuccessful Luban operation, carried out in January-April 1942. But General Fedyuninsky in his memoirs does not keep silent about the failure, but devotes an entire chapter of his book “Alarmed” with the eloquent title “This could not have happened” to it, where he analyzes the reasons for the failure of this attempt to unblock Leningrad. The book of memoirs of General Fedyuninsky was written in 1961, 15 years before the former sergeant Nikulin sat down to write his memoirs.

“... our Pogostye station was allegedly taken on the move, at the end of December, when we first approached these places. But there was a supply of alcohol in the station buildings, and the drunken heroes were cut out by the Germans who came to the rescue. Since then, all attempts to break through ended in failure. The story is typical! How many times then had to hear it at different times and in different sectors of the front!

One of the most common front-line tales that went around all sectors of the front, without documentary evidence. It competes in popularity with a story about tanks of alcohol specially left by the Germans, the capture of which allows them to immediately recapture the settlement back, since everyone was drunk. Nikulin could not pass by either, this story surfaced already when describing the events of the last year of the war:

“... I came to the basement when there was a knee-deep puddle on the concrete floor, the air filled with alcohol vapors was intoxicating. In some places, in the liquid, one could see cotton trousers and earflaps of choked drinkers. .

As already mentioned, there is not a single respectful mention of a woman in the war in the book of Nikolai Nikulin. They all look like either dumb sex slaves or conscientious women of easy virtue:

“... Hungry soldiers ... had no time for women, but the authorities got their way by any means, from rough pressure to the most exquisite courtship. ... And the girls went home with the addition of a family. Someone was looking for this himself ... It used to be worse. I was told how a certain Colonel Volkov lined up female reinforcements and, passing along the line, selected the beauties he liked. Such became his LPG, and if they resisted - on the lip, in a cold dugout, on bread and water! Then the baby went from hand to hand, got to different mothers and deputies. In the best Asian traditions!”

The fate of women at the front was most often very difficult, and even after the war they got it - for almost ten years the words “front-line soldier” and “whore” were practically synonymous. Here is what another veteran Vasily Pavlovich Bryukhov recalled about this: “In general, my attitude towards women has always been the most touching. After all, I myself had five sisters, whom I always protected. Therefore, I was very attentive to the girls. How did the girls suffer? It was more difficult for them a hundred times than for us peasants! It's especially embarrassing for the female nurses. They also rode tanks, took out the wounded from the battlefield and, as a rule, received the medal "For Military Merit" - one, two, three. Laughed that received "For sexual attempts." Of the girls, rarely anyone had the Order of the Red Star. And those who are closer to the body of the commander. How were they treated after the war? Well, imagine: we have a thousand two hundred personnel in our brigade. All men. All are young. Everyone is hitting wedges. And there are sixteen girls in the whole brigade. One did not like it, the second did not like it, but someone liked it, and she begins to meet with him, and then to live. And the rest are jealous: “Ah, she is so-and-so. PPJ". Many good girls were dishonored. Like this". Since Nikolai Nikulin is one of those who did not get female affection at the front, it is with regret that we have to state that in his memoirs he embarked on the path of that very “glorification” of all 800,000 women participating in the war.

“At the beginning of the war, the German armies entered our territory like a hot knife through butter. To slow down their movement, there was no other means than to pour blood on the blade of this knife. Gradually, he began to rust and dull and moved more and more slowly. And the blood flowed and flowed. So the Leningrad militia burned down. Two hundred thousand of the best, the color of the city.

The total number of combat units of the Leningrad militia was about 160,000 people, while there is no doubt that part of the militia managed to survive. For example, Daniil Granin, who fought until the very Victory and is still alive today. Fought in the Leningrad People's Militia Army and actor Boris Blinov, who played the role of Furmanov in Chapaev. He survived the July battles, was evacuated to Kazakhstan with the Lenfilm film studio, managed to star in Wait for Me, and died in 1943 from typhoid fever.

“... And a hundred Ivanovs get up and wander through the deep snow under the crossroads of German machine guns. And the Germans in warm bunkers, well-fed and drunk, impudent, foresaw everything, calculated everything, shot everything and beat, beat, like in a shooting range. However, it was not so easy for the enemy soldiers. Recently, a German veteran told me that among the machine gunners of their regiment there were cases of insanity: it is not so easy to kill people row after row - but they keep coming and going, and there is no end to them.

In analyzing this episode, we will not dwell on the generalizations already mentioned several times. Surprisingly, the memories of former German soldiers often look exactly the same, only in them it is the “Ivans” who are perfectly equipped, fed and occupy equipped positions. Apparently, it's good where we are not?

“... The regiments lost their orientation in the dense forest, went out to the wrong place. Rifles and machine guns often did not fire because of the frost, artillery hit an empty place, and sometimes even their own. There were not enough shells ... The Germans knew everything about the movements of our troops, about their composition and numbers. They had excellent air reconnaissance, radio interception and much more. .

Of course, the Wehrmacht was a very strong enemy, in many respects superior in its combat capabilities to the Red Army. However, to make cyborgs out of German soldiers and officers who see the location of the Red Army through and through is at least reckless. German documents, just like ours, are full of reports of poor interaction between the branches of the armed forces, delays in promotion, and poor organization of headquarters and intelligence work. If the Germans were omniscient, then their defeat near Moscow simply would not have happened, just as the Victory would not have happened. The question also arises: how in 1975 did the former sergeant Nikulin know about German air reconnaissance, radio interception and other things? Moreover, Nikulin contradicts himself, citing the memoirs of a German soldier below in the text:

“We didn’t have winter clothes, only light overcoats, and at a temperature of -40, even -50 degrees, there was little heat in wooden bunkers with an iron stove. How we survived all this remains a mystery to this day.”

Once again, we are faced with an attempt by the memoirist not to deal with those difficult experiences that accompanied his life at the front, but to fence himself off from them with a wall of general phrases and meaningless generalizations.

“... I found out how our commander I.I. Fedyuninsky was talking to the division commanders: “Your mother! Forward!!! If you don't move, I'll shoot you! Yo Mama! To attack! Yo Mama!" ... About two years ago, the elderly Ivan Ivanovich, a kind grandfather, told the Octobrists on TV about the war in completely different tones ... "

It is interesting that the author puts on the same level commanders who are not able to fulfill the order, and children of primary school age. Apparently, General Fedyuninsky was supposed to speak the same way in both cases, but it’s not clear how exactly?

"... felt boots were replaced with boots with windings - an idiotic device, all the time unwinding and dangling on the feet."

There were many adherents of boots with windings in the infantry. Many war veterans note that in the off-season conditions, the windings, which played the role of an ersatz top, proved to be better than boots. Zhelmontov Anatoly Yakovlevich recalls: “The windings are good - snow does not fall, they dry quickly.” Osipov Sergey Nikolevich echoes him: “When we came to the Batya shoe factory, the Czechs offered us to exchange our boots with windings for boots for free. But none of the soldiers wanted to take off the windings, because the boots rub their legs, and the windings are very comfortable on the march. Maybe they just needed to learn how to wind them correctly?

“... Having become a sniper, however, I was appointed commander of the submachine gunners’ squad, as there were not enough junior commanders. Here I had enough hot to tears. As a result of the fighting, the branch ceased to exist. Service in the infantry was interspersed with assignments to the artillery. We were given a captured 37mm cannon, and I, as a former artilleryman (!?), became a gunner there. When this cannon was broken, they brought a domestic forty-five, and with it I "covered myself." Such is the history of my glorious service in the 311th s. during the Mginsk operation of 1943.

It would seem that this is what you need to write about! How he went on a "hunt", how the squad fought. Who are the people who fell into our land, and why are they not listed by name? And most likely because none of this happened. According to the alphabetical record book of privates and sergeants of the 1067th rifle regiment of the 311th rifle division, stored in the divisional fund in the archive of the Ministry of Defense (inventory 73 646, case 5), junior sergeant N. N. Nikulin was wounded on 08/23/1943 and left the unit . The indicated military registration specialty of the wounded (VUS) is interesting - No. 121. According to the list of military specialties, this is a nurse or medical instructor, but not a sniper or a gunner. This is one mention of the author in the documents of the units and formations in which he happened to fight.

The second episode also contradicts Nikulin's memoirs. He writes that he “became his own” in the 534th separate medical and sanitary company due to a series of injuries, and as a result, after one of them, he remained in the company’s staff as a foreman (in fact, an administrative and economic position) . The surviving order for the 48th Guards Heavy Howitzer Artillery Brigade dated August 31, 1944 (fund of the 48th Guards TGABr, op. 2, d. 2, l. 116) reports the exclusion from the allowance of personnel. At the end of the list, after the dead, missing and wounded, there is a list of those who left due to illness, and the last line reads: "…eighteen. Radiotelegrapher of the senior 1st battery of the Guards. ml. Sergeant Nikulin N. N. - in 543 MSR from 08/31/1944 " . Here is such a not quite heroic departure from the front line, which has no place in truthful memoirs.

“Before the battles, we were handed a divisional banner. ... Passing in front of the formation, the colonel was looking for two assistants to accompany the banner. ... The most suitable unexpectedly turned out to be ... I, probably because of my numerous medals and the badge of the guards.

In 1943, the author did not have a guards rank, nor "numerous medals" - he will receive the first medal "For Courage" a year later, in July 1944. The maximum that Nikulin could receive by the summer of 1943 was the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad", established in December 1942, but was it rare among the soldiers who fought on the same sector of the front?

“... Once on a frosty winter day in 1943, our colonel called me and said: “It is planned to redeploy troops ... take two soldiers, food for a week and go to take a good dugout for the headquarters in advance. If we don't come back in a week, come back."

What position should junior sergeant Nikulin have to hold in order for “our colonel” to call him from somewhere?

“This is how one nurse told about what she ... saw: “... Suddenly, a German fighter fell out of the clouds, flew low, at a low level flight over the clearing, and the pilot, leaning out of the cockpit, methodically shot helpless people sprawled on the ground with automatic fire . It was evident that the machine gun in his hands was Soviet, with a disc!”

Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov, apparently, decided to creatively rework and use this episode in his film “Burnt by the Sun-2”, where the shooter of a German bomber decides to “bomb” transport with evacuated own excrement. The author would have tried to stick out some part of the body from the cockpit of a fighter flying at a speed of 300-400 kilometers per hour - perhaps people would not have had a chance to read frankly stupid stories and watch the same stupid movie.

“Is it really impossible to avoid the monstrous victims of 1941 – 1942? Do without senseless, doomed to failure attacks by Pogostye, Sinyavino, Nevskaya Dubrovka and many other similar places?

Apparently it was possible. Or not. In any case, this is not within the competence of Sergeant Nikulin, whose gaze “The events of those years are directed not from above, not from the general’s bell tower, from where everything is visible, but from below, from the point of view of a soldier” . By the way, as an excuse for Nikulin, it is worth mentioning that he was unlucky with the place of his war - something like the unfortunate Canadians of 1917 near Paschendahl, or Russian soldiers in the fall of 1916 in the Kovel dead end. Positional warfare, "battles for the forester's hut", advance of 30 meters after a three-week artillery preparation. Alas, Nikulin, like his colleagues, ended up in hell.

It is difficult to judge the professional qualities of the post-war art historian Nikulin, but the fact that he unjustifiably boldly takes on mathematical calculations is obvious. Here is his methodology for calculating the losses of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War:

“I cannot judge global statistics. 20 or 40 million, maybe more? I only know what I saw. My "native" 311th rifle division let through about 200 thousand people during the war years. (According to the last head of the construction department, Neretin.) This means 60,000 dead! And we had more than 400 such divisions. The arithmetic is simple ... The wounded were mostly cured and again got to the front. Everything started all over again for them. In the end, having passed through a meat grinder two or three times, they died. Thus, several generations of the healthiest, most active men, primarily Russians, were completely erased from life. And the vanquished? The Germans lost 7 million in total, of which only a part, however, the largest, on the Eastern Front. So, the ratio of those killed: 1 to 10, or even more - in favor of the defeated. Great win! This ratio haunts me all my life like a nightmare. Mountains of corpses near Pogost, near Sinyavino and everywhere where I had to fight, stand before me. According to official data, 17 people were killed per square meter of some sections of the Neva Dubrovka. Corpses, corpses" .

Please note that the author himself denies the right to make such statements (“I cannot judge”), but immediately forgets about it. If we take the minimum dimensions of the Nevsky Piglet from all those mentioned in the literature, i.e. 1000 by 350 meters, and multiply by 17, you get 6,000,000 dead Soviet soldiers. Is it not enough to describe the actions of mediocre commanders, perhaps more should be added?

“It turns out that the rational Germans took everything into account here. Their veterans are clearly distinguished by the degree of participation in the battles. The documents show different categories of the front: I - the first trench and no man's land. These are honored (during the war there was a special sign for participating in attacks and hand-to-hand combat, for knocked out tanks, etc.). II - artillery positions, headquarters of companies and battalions. III - other front-line rears. This category is looked down upon.” .

There is a complete ignorance of the realities of the life of German veterans of World War II after the war or a deliberate distortion of facts. The process of denazification in post-war German society, both in the GDR and in the FRG, led to the fact that the former soldiers of the Wehrmacht, not to mention the SS, had a general attitude as war criminals, and no one thought to honor them. It’s also not worth talking about any benefits or military pensions - the time of military service in the Nazi army was simply included in the total length of service. What documents and categories is Nikulin talking about?

“... Our commander stood at the stereo tube - a stately, handsome young colonel. Freshly shaven, ruddy, smelling of cologne, in an ironed tunic. After all, he slept in a comfortable covered car with a stove, and not in a hole. He had no earth in his hair, and the lice did not eat him. And for breakfast he had not gruel, but well-fried potatoes with American stew. And he was an educated artilleryman, he graduated from the Academy, he knew his business. In 1943, there were very few of these, since most were shot in 1939 – 1940, the rest died in the forty-first, and people who accidentally surfaced on the surface turned out to be in command posts.

If we abstract from envy and hatred for commanders who do not look like the author, it is worth asking only one question: how did the Red Army survive before the appearance of handsome colonels? Could it be that “people who accidentally surfaced” and semi-literate sergeants fought against the Germans, and fought, despite all the mistakes, not bad? Or did they not all shoot? But a colonel could have been a lieutenant in 1941, and he got into the Academy for a reason. We won’t be surprised if it turns out that in those years when Nikulin was at school, the colonel was already “pulling the strap” at the artillery school of the People’s Commissariat of Education. But the author does not care about such trifles, he cares about something else:

« Swollen from hunger, you slurp an empty gruel - water with water, and nearby an officer guzzles butter. He is entitled to a special ration, and for him the captain steals food from a soldier's boiler ».

“… Memoirs, memoirs… Who writes them? What memoirs can those who actually fought have? Pilots, tankers and, above all, infantrymen? Injury is death, injury is death, injury is death –and that's it! There was no other. Memoirs are written by those who were near the war. In the second echelon, at headquarters. Or corrupt hacks who expressed the official point of view, according to which we cheerfully won, and the evil fascists fell by the thousands, slain by our well-aimed fire. Simonov, "honest writer", what did he see? They took him for a ride in a submarine, once he went on the attack with infantry, once with scouts, looked at the artillery preparation - and now he “saw everything” and “experienced everything”! (Others, however, did not see this either.) He wrote with aplomb, and all this is an embellished lie. And Sholokhov's "They fought for the Motherland" is just propaganda! There is no need to talk about small mongrels.”

Strange logic. Firstly, by the time Nikulin wrote his memoirs, a sufficient number of memoirs of people had been published, about which even then it was known for certain where and how they fought. Among them were pilots, and tankers, and even infantrymen were. Yes, not everyone had such a literary gift as Nikulin, yes, many memoirs were edited by professional writers. Finally, some of the memoirs (for example, the famous “Memoirs of a Tanker” by G. Penezhko) were more reminiscent of the tales of Baron Munchausen, but there were also truthful books that “beat” even against documents that their authors at that time simply could not have access to. As for the attacks on Sholokhov, let them remain on the conscience of the author, while Konstantin Simonov's memoirs about the war were read by many. What is his fault before Nikulin is not clear. Probably, the 2nd rank military officer, the correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda and the husband of Valentina Serova had to go down, feed the lice and eat the slop. Then his memories of the war, of course, in the eyes of Nikulin would immediately become worthy of respect. By the way, about the “small mongrels”: when Nikulin finished writing his memoirs, Konstantin Vorobyov, the author of “Killed near Moscow”, had already died of cancer, the star of Vyacheslav Kondratiev, who drank grief in the Rzhev meat grinder, was wounded and, in the end, demobilized due to injury, had not yet risen . His first story "Sashka" was published only in 1979. Let us imagine with horror that Nikolai Nikulin wrote it. Could such lines escape from his pen? Very doubtful:

“They came running soon - fine, flushed from running, their caps are slightly on one side, their wasp waists are pulled with canvas Red Army belts, their overcoats are fitted, and they smell of perfume, Muscovites, in a word ... They brought Sasha a mug of boiling water, in which he had four pieces of sugar they thumped, a loaf of gray Moscow bread, more precisely, not a loaf, but such a big loaf, they took out several packs of concentrates from a duffel bag (and buckwheat!) And, finally, half-smoked sausages about a kilogram.

- You eat, eat ... - they said, cutting a loaf, sausage and handing him sandwiches, but he can’t eat from tenderness and frustration.

And then they sat down near Sasha on both sides. He will move away from one - close to the other, no matter how they get away from him. And Sashka fidgeted, but, of course, it doesn’t even occur to them that he is moving away from them. They fuss around Sasha, treat him - one is holding a mug while he is taking bread, the other is cutting sausage at this time. And they breathe freshness and homeliness, only the military uniform speaks for itself - front-line, unknown roads await them, and therefore they are even dearer to him, even more expensive.

Why are you going to war, girls? Wouldn't need to...

- What do you! Is it possible to sit in the rear when all our boys are fighting? It's embarrassing...

So you volunteer?

– Of course! All the thresholds at the military registration and enlistment office were knocked down, - one answered and laughed. - Do you remember, Tonya, as a military commissar at the beginning ...

“Yeah,” laughed the other.

And Sashka, looking at them, smiled involuntarily, but a bitter smile came out - these little girls still don’t know anything, war is tempting for them, like they look at an adventure, but war is something completely different ...

Then one of them, looking straight into Sasha's eyes, asked:

- Tell me ... Only the truth, always the truth. Is it scary there?

“It’s scary, girls,” Sasha answered very seriously. - And you need to know this ... so that you are ready.

We understand, we understand...

They got up, began to say goodbye, their train was about to depart. They stretched out their hands, and Sasha is embarrassed to give his hand - black, burned, dirty - but they ignore it, they press their thin fingers, from which the manicure has not yet left, Sasha's rough paw, wish a speedy recovery, and Sasha's heart bleeds : something will happen to these glorious girls, what fate awaits them at the front?

By the way, we note that in Kondratiev’s story (in this and later ones) there is dirt, and lice, and hunger, and semi-literate mediocre commanders, but there is no hatred for all living things and a violent desire to impose one’s own personal view of the war on everyone as the only correct (with constant and flirtatious reservations about subjectivity). It is hard to believe that from 1975 until the publication of his book in 2007, Nikulin was in the dark about both new literary works and new historical research. Obviously, he formulated everything for himself forever.

You can fish out quotes from the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin for a long time (the above excerpts are taken from about the first third of the book), sort out where his personal knowledge is, and where are unverified rumors that he, in his inner conviction, considered true. But this occupation is ungrateful, and the author himself will no longer be able to answer our reproaches. When analyzing his memoirs, we, first of all, wanted to note their psychotherapeutic role for the author. It seems to us that by pouring out all the accumulated bitterness on paper, Nikolai Nikolayevich thus significantly extended his life, getting rid of the suffering that memories of the war caused him. Whatever we write about his book “Memories of the War”, this does not negate the fact that it is one of the important sources on the history of the Great Patriotic War. The trials that fell to Nikulin's lot were never dreamed of by any of us and, perhaps, would have broken anyone, both physically and mentally. Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikulin, like millions of our compatriots, went through almost the entire war, finished it in Berlin with the rank of Guards sergeant, awarded two medals "For Courage" and the Order of the Red Star. His memories of the war are just a touch to a huge and tragic canvas, which he, a great connoisseur of art, examined from the only angle available to him. He understood that his view was just one of the possible interpretations of that grandiose historical event that was the war. Neither the absolutization of this view as the only correct one, nor the denial of the right to its existence is in any way permissible, and the book of Nikolai Nikulin will remain one of the many voices mutilated by the war. In any case, for the sake of completeness, the interested reader should not limit himself to this source of knowledge.

The authors would like to thank Artem Drabkin for help with the review.

Portal for the student. Self-training

Artem Drabkin "Trench Truth" of the Wehrmacht. War through the eyes of the enemy

To the reader

Foreword

Evert Gottfried

RELATED ARTICLES

Artem Drabkin
"Trench Truth" of the Wehrmacht. War through the eyes of the enemy